Super late but I totally binged the hell out of this over the last few days from some bizarre impulse.

I actually didn't dislike it as much as I thought I would - or as much as, like, HotS. The story and writing and especially the way those things were presented was pretty bad, but I wasn't groaning through half the missions like HotS. Maybe I'm just chiller than I used to be.

Like, alright, I am sick of the SC2 mission formula (destroy these three things, or hold these three points, also do these three things if you have time for bonus points) and LotV obviously did very little to spice this up. But I did genuinely enjoy playing around with new units and picking between what faction to use for units, plus some of the Spear of Adun's abilities were just plain fun to use.

The crew in this one was miles more interesting than anyone in HotS (Abathur was the only one I remotely cared about there), although Rohana was pretty exceptionally boring. I was surprised to find that I liked Karax. Given his short, stocky look and the weird beard I expected him to just be protoss Swann - and he kind of was - but at some point I started to like him. Some of his dialogue made me smile in a weirdly genuine way.

Krazy's favourite buddy Al was kind of interesting I guess? Vorazun was pretty cool. I was definitely a fan of what they were going for with Fenix, but his inaccurate voice acting and inconsistent personality made it impossible for me to think of him as the same character as the one in SCBW. My biggest problem with the crew in this one is that their personalities are so rarely and vaguely explored - by the end of, say, Matt Horner's set of missions in WoL, I felt like I understood and connected with Horner and what he was all about. In LotV, we get those scenes like Hearts and Minds (the one where Jim and Horner have a smoke in the bar) with each member of the crew (e.g. Karax becoming a Templar) but hardly ever do things leading up to these scenes actually feel like they progress to them naturally. Fenix's revelations about himself, for example, just seem rushed as hell. It was a real shame since I actually would have liked to become invested in some of these characters, and the only one I managed to genuinely care about by the end was Karax.

As for Artanis, much like Fenix I simply cannot associate him with his BW counterpart, lol. Treating him as a distinct character on his own grounds, he was 'likeable' in the sense that he was written to be likeable. He's the strong idealistic protoss templar hero who Sometimes Has Doubts, of course you're supposed to feel for him. In the end, though, there's really not a whole lot about him that's compelling. Even Jim in WoL had more issues than Artanis to make him interesting (I mean, he completely abandons his fight against the Dominion to go save his alien girlfriend - the dude has problems).

Zeratul's death? Yawn. Not really necessary or compelling in my books. It seemed a little strange to kill him off so early considering he is probably the character that carried the Amon arc the longest - ever since the 'key to the end of all things' scene in WoL, but hey, whatever! Gotta pass the proverbial torch on to Artanis!

There are a lot of things I could say about the epilogue but the big funky chicken firing a laser beam at cthulu speaks for itself

Kerrigan showing up in the bar to pick up Jim made no sense and nothing about it was explained and it all seemed really stupid and I don't know why Metzen is so obsessed with their relationship and why he thinks StarCraft revolves around them, buuuut it was pretty feel good, if I ignore the context.

Anyway. 3/5. More likely to play again than HotS, less likely than WoL